Fifty sit-ups every night is an idea that pops into the minds of many people at some point in their lives. Whether you’re thinking 50 sit-ups, 50 sit-ups, 50 leg raises, or even 50 knee-high jump squats. Consistently working on your abdominal muscles a little each night will, in fact, give you little results.

First you need to understand what it is you really want to do. What is your ultimate goal with all these abs? Do you want to burn fat from your midsection? Or do you just want ripped and defined abs? Or maybe it’s both, yes?

Well, if you really want to burn your belly fat, concentrating on abdominal muscle exercises will give you very little success. It is necessary to adapt a healthy diet and exercise program. This should absolutely include some sort of cardio routine, as well as 2-3 days of weight training each week.

The fat around your midsection isn’t there because you have weak abs. You could do sit-ups every day until it hurts to laugh, and all you do is make your abdominal muscles grow. You are not burning much fat at all.

Start doing cardio to burn fat, eat healthy foods, and you’ll burn that fat forever.

If you just want to firm up those abs and get a six pack, then it’s pretty much the same thing, as fat deposits are usually what make our stomachs look soft. Burning that fat will pull that skin to outline your abdominal muscles. In this case, you need to do abdominal exercises to build that muscle.

50 sit-ups a night is not the way to do this. You need to do a good, effective and almost exhausting abs workout 3 or 4 days a week maximum.

Try this:

1. Wait until you haven’t eaten for 2 hours.
2. Lie down and start doing sit-ups (mentally focus on tensing your abs with each sit-up)
3. Keep track of how many you do
4. Keep doing them until you can no longer lift your shoulder blades off the ground (you might be surprised).
5. Wait 3 to 5 minutes
6. Do it again, strive to do the same number
7. Again, 3 to 5 minutes.
8. Do it one more time, striving for that first number again

Now once you are done with these you need to write down your numbers for each of the 3 sets. Do this routine every other night. After the first week, try to add 10 or 15 to each set you do. Increase that number every week.

There are many other abdominal exercises you can do, and some may be more effective for you, while others may not. Either way, it doesn’t really matter what moves you do, just push yourself for this type of performance-based training and the results will follow.